Phil is sooooo in trouble

WARNING: This post is mostly about me venting. It's way too long and you will probably lose interest after the first sentence or two. To make it slightly more appealing to anybody who decides to continue reading, I'll add a few pictures, even if they aren't relevant. Feel free to skip this one and come back tomorrow.

A year or two ago I got a call from a friend who needed to take her baby (that's Kara on the left)to the doctor and they needed a ride. I was more than happy to help her out and if all had gone well I wouldn’t be writing about it now. However, while I was helping her get the baby and all the paraphernalia that comes with a baby into the doctor’s office, I fumbled with my keys and they ended up at the bottom of an elevator shaft. After several months and many, many calls to the doctor and to the elevator company, my keys were finally located. Happy day! However, before they notified me to come pick them up, the doctor lost them and they have never been seen since. Sad day! Being the cheapskate that I am, combined with the fact that I am a fairly stubborn person when it comes to “the principle of the thing”, I refuse to pay the Mazda dealership $150+ for a new key to our Tribute (something like $65 for the key and another $95 to program it to actually work). That decision has caused me more grief than I ever imagined.

I’m getting to the part where Phil is in trouble.

We now have one key to our Tribute that is not attached to either of our key chains. I have locked the Tribute key in the car twice since they elevator incident. Thanks to my dear friends who are members of AAA, those incidents have been relatively minor inconveniences. I have also taken off in the Protégé with the Tribute key in my purse leaving Phil stranded at home. That’s happened too many times for me to count, and it always results in me having to return home to give Phil the key. Each time he gets exasperated and asks/tells me to “Go get another key!” Up to this point I’ve held my ground, while researching alternatives to getting a key from the dealership.

Although I’m definitely coming across as not real bright at this point, Phil really is the one who is in trouble. I’m getting there.

So, yesterday morning Phil left home to drop Noah off on his way to work. I stayed home to get Adam off to school before I also left for work. As Adam and I were heading out the door, I came to the sick realization that I didn’t have my keys – any of them. Phil had the Tribute and although the Protégé was sitting in the garage, my Protégé key was sitting on my desk at work. The day before I had used my keys to get something out of Phil’s office – FOR PHIL – and then I left my keys sitting on my desk when I went home. I didn’t miss my keys because I drove home in the Tribute. When I realized that I was stranded yesterday morning, I took a deep breathe (to prepare for the “puh-lease get another key” lecture that I knew was coming) and then called Phil to see if he would come get me. I’m actually happy to say that although he forced a chuckle and I’m certain that there was a pretty major eye roll on his end of the phone, there really wasn’t much of a lecture. He brought my keys to me and then we returned to work without too much agony.

So far, so good, but the trouble part is on the horizon.

Last night I went with our Young Women on a bike ride. (That's me and another leader with most of our girls hiking at girl's camp last summer. I didn't have my camera for the bike ride, but I'm trying to find somewhat relevant pictures to break it up in case anybody is still reading. Now that I'm looking at the picture, either I'm really, really, tall or they are just miniature teenagers. I look enormous next to all of them.) Anyway, when I got home from work I had about 45 minutes to feed the boys and get three bikes ready for me and two of the girls who were without wheels. I decided that since the weather wasn’t frosty, it would be fun to take the boys on their first ride of the season, so I got Adam’s bike and Noah’s trailer all ready to go too. I hooked up our four-wheeler trailer to the Tribute so that I could haul all of the bikes. I remembered water and jackets for all of us. I then loaded our bikes on the trailer and then went to the church to pick up the girls and load more bikes. We rode out to the lake on the river trail and had a great time. Then it was time to get Noah and Adam back in the car and load the bikes on the trailer again, which is quite a process since the trailer isn’t built for bicycles at all. Quite honestly, I was a little worried that bikes would be bouncing off the trailer the entire way home, in spite of my arranging and tying down and re-arranging. Fortunately, we made it home and everything was intact. I unloaded the bikes once again and sent the girls all home. Tuesday is volleyball night so I only had about 30 minutes to do a million more things: I cleared the Tribute of the bike ride stuff (jackets, water bottles, kids, Adam’s bike, Noah’s trailer, etc.), unhitched the trailer and put it away (heavvvvvvvvy, by the way); disassembled Noah’s trailer and put the pieces away; put the hitch and the hitch pin back in the proper place in the garage (precisely as Phil had requested); and deposited Adam in the shower. My friend Sue showed up to give me a ride to volleyball so she got Noah ready for bed while I changed my clothes and tried to wash all of the bike/trailer grime off of my hands. As I was putting my volleyball shoes on, Phil came in from his long day.

I relate all of those details to help make my point. I ran around like crazy for 4 hours doing a ton of things. The one thing that I forgot to do didn’t occur to me until morning . . . when I went to grab my purse . . . and my keys . . . to head out the door to drop Adam off at school on my way to work . . .after Phil had already left . . . in the Tribute . . . with my purse still hidden under the front seat . . . where I had crammed it so that it would be out of sight while we rode our bikes. Doh!!!

This is what you have been waiting for, where I explain why Phil is in trouble even though I’m the one that’s not looking so good in this story so far.

After I sent Adam off to school on foot for the second day in a row, I called Phil. I explained my dilemma. Phil’s response? He said something about meetings, offered a brief lecture about me not using my frontal lobe, and then gave me the number for the bus that comes closest to our house. When it became clear that he wasn’t kidding, and that he wasn't going to bring me my keys, I got off the phone and then ignored the phone when he called back a few minutes later with a better response. (Phil accuses me of playing the martyr in situations like this, and he's probably right.) I was bugged, but not completely mad until I found myself sitting on the bus an hour later, stuck at the train tracks for close to 45 minutes while 1/2 of one train car blocked the road. It's amazing how much stewing can be done in that situation, and I'm a pretty good stewer.

One thing that I realized while sitting on that bus is that martyrs, although they may make their point, usually end up dead.